1. Field of the Invention
The present invention is generally related to an electrical connector, and especially, to an electrical connector having easy to assembly conductive contacts.
2. Description of Related Art
An electrical connector, adapted to standard peripheral equipment, such as hard disks, optical disks, etc., such as those meeting the Serial ATA (Advanced Technology attachment) specification, are designed to supply electric currents having different voltage values while being capable of transmitting electric signal data at high speeds, and can even be coupled to or detached from peripheral equipment when an electronic device is running, achieving the so-called hot plugging feature.
In order to achieve the hot plugging function, in practice of a serial ATA electrical connector, the conductive contacts are generally designed to have different lengths. That is, for a conductive contact dedicated to detection, the length of its contact portion, which is disposed to electrically contact a corresponding electrical connector, is shorter than that of contact portions of other conductive contacts that are dedicated to signal transmission. Thus, during the process of inter-engagement of the electrical connector and the corresponding electrical connector, the detecting conductive contact will achieve electrical connection last. On the contrary, during the process of disengagement of the electrical connector from the corresponding electrical connector, the detecting conductive contact will be the first to achieve electrical disconnection, thereby ensuring stability of data transmission.
Since conductive contacts of at least two different lengths are required, in the case of the currently adopted manufacturing process of using a machine to assemble the same to an insulating housing by “strip insertion,” it is necessary to punch long and short conductive contacts from the same material strip. Therefore, during the punching process, punching machinery has to be programmed to automatically perform replacement and adjustment of punching molds when the length of the contacts on the material strip varies. Hence, compared with continuous punching of conductive contacts of the same length, it takes time to replace and adjust the molds, thereby increasing the overall punching time relatively and reducing the manufacturing efficiency considerably. On the other hand, to meet the requirement of punching conductive contacts of different lengths, in the design of molds, the structure of such molds will be more complicated than those for punching conductive contacts of the same length, thereby increase costs of manufacture.
Hence, an improved connector assembly is required to overcome the disadvantages of the prior art.